Ali, known in the Pamir above all as Shoh-i Mardon, the 'King of Men', and as Mushkil-kusho, the 'Remover of Hardship', is far more than the historical fourth caliph in local belief. Folk tradition makes him a heroic liberator who descends against the divs, slays the demon and frees its captives, a figure scholars set beside the ancient hero Rustam and read as the Muslim overlay of an older Iranian warrior-deity and disseminator of good. His passage across the land is written into the rock as qadamgoh, the footprints and hoofprints that sanctify springs and boulders throughout Badakhshan. Within the house he is the Vouznek pillar, the post of weddings where the bridal pair is seated for good fortune, aligned in the older reckoning with Mehr, the yazata of love and the sun.